


between the wolf & the dog

by orphan_account



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-06-05
Updated: 2012-06-05
Packaged: 2017-11-06 23:15:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/424307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Still no letter. ‘That’s that, then,” Remus hears his Dad say when he’s meant to be in bed but he’s actually reading some old books he found in the library under his duvet.</p>
<p>Remus/Sirius at some point in the future. For now, it's Remus as a child before Hogwarts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	between the wolf & the dog

**November, 1963**

 

For weeks after it happened, Remus’s parents shout at each other about why had they never fixed the fucking window. But they just hadn’t. They don’t bother now, but pack up & move as soon as Remus is strong enough.

 

Remus always remembers being bitten, of course, & nothing before. But he remembers, after it, all of the clattering, & Dad crying.

 

 

♠

 

**March, 1970**

 

Remus doesn’t get a letter. For his 11th birthday his Mum gave him some old books and his Dad had sat smoking rollies out of the window, which made his Mum angry because they’d only borrowed the canal boat for a month or two & did Remus’s Dad want to set it on fire?

 

Remus’s Dad sat up all night writing letters. He’d found a new clinic somewhere in Russia, Remus heard him say.

 

 

**April, 1970**

 

Remus doesn’t get a letter again. His parents hadn’t expected him to, & Remus wasn’t really sure exactly what the letter was or how it was meant to find him, as they keep moving & nobody else knows who they are or where they are. But anyway there was a letter he keeps hearing his parents talk about & it hasn’t come. Maybe it was a birthday card that got lost, Remus thinks, wistfully. Maybe it was another clinic.

 

 

**July, 1970**

 

Still no letter. ‘That’s that, then,” Remus hears his Dad say when he’s meant to be in bed but he’s actually reading some old books he found in the library under his duvet.

 

“His tongue hanging out, and his eyes glaring like marsh-fires!” said the confidant of Picou.

“Mon Dieu! if I met the monster, I should run,” quoth another.

 

Remus frowns at the story, & flicks back then turns the book around in his hands to stare at the illustration at the beginning of the book. It’s in black & white, & it shows a wolf sneering as he stands on top of a fallen man. Remus doesn’t really know what he looks like when he’s transformed, but is it like this? His parents usually shut him up in a secure cellar somewhere, he’s not sure where, & he just howls & scrabbles about in the dark.

 

He flicks back & forth through the book for a while longer, then puts it under his pillow & tries to sleep. It’s a muggle book – he’s not quite sure what a muggle is, really, but in this case it means he KNOWS that the book is wrong, largely because it keeps going on as if werewolves are just a myth.

 

 

  _“The Were Wolf”_

_  
_

__

He can’t stop thinking about it, even when he tries to sleep, so he gets the book out from under his pillow then stuffs it into the box the furthest from his bed, still not unpacked from their last move. After tossing & turning for hours, Remus finally gets to sleep only a short while before he’s woken up again & told that he needs to pack up the rest of his things, he’s going away for a while. 

 

**August, 1970**

 

Remus spends the month in a strange clinic somewhere in Eastern Europe. He doesn’t speak the language & his parents wouldn’t tell him how long he was going to be here for, but it’s not too bad, as they mostly just have him drinking all these weird juices & sleeping on a bed covered in crystals. His Mum gave him a few books & a pack of cards & his Dad let him keep his battered leather jacket, so Remus spends most days cross-legged on his bed wrapped in it, reading the same stories over & over again. After a while he finds a fat pencil stub somewhere in the clinic & starts writing his own stories about a werewolf who’s friendly & nice & has lots of friends who like him in the blank pages at the back of the book, which is a collection of fairy tales that Remus already knows. The pencil gets blunt after a while & Remus wants to cry, but then he looks again & it’s as sharp as it was when he found it, maybe sharper. He wonders how long he’ll be here for.

 

 

**September, 1970**

 

Remus receives a letter at the clinic, but it’s from his parents, & they say that the clinic wants to keep him for another week & then he can come home, & they’ve found a house to rent & he’s going to start secondary school, a real normal secondary school! 

 

Remus remembers a few primary schools that his parents tried sending him to, but they always had to move & he never made any friends & after a while it was easier for his parents to just teach him at home. This means that Remus is great at reading & writing & doing card tricks, but he’s not very good at maths or history. His Mum sometimes tries to teach him about the kings & queens but his Dad is HOPELESS, he just says he doesn’t know much about muggle stuff & then his Mum hisses at him & he stops talking, he still hasn’t even told Remus what a muggle is.

 

Remus is glad that he’s got the letter, as his books were filling up with all his stories. He writes all over the paper, but nothing in particular, just sentences, kind of like a diary but a diary that makes no sense. Remus supposes he’s lonely, & hopes that the next clinic is at least in England or Scotland or Ireland or even Wales (he lived in Wales, once; it was very rainy) because not being able to speak with anyone about anything is _doing his head in_.

 

 

**February, 1971**

 

Remus isn’t so sure he likes the real, normal, secondary school. He never took the 11+, whatever that is, so they’ve got him doing a weird mix of subjects that he hasn’t done before & boys from the grammar school down the road sometimes stand near the gates wearing ties & shout at him & the others when they’re going home.

 

His English teacher says that Remus can take the 11+ & if he passes he can go to the grammar probably & then go to university too, but Remus has heard his parents whispering & expects that they’ll be moving house soon, & anyway, why would he want to go to the grammar school with all the boys who wear those stupid blazers anyway? Remus quite likes the jumper he wears to school, it’s a nice shade of red. The ties are nicer here too. He doesn’t really have any friends, but not that many people seem to dislike him, & he’s getting quite good at woodwork. He sits with a few boys at lunch every day who are okay, & one of them lent him a copy of a book called _The Lord of the Rings_ that Remus can’t stop thinking about, although he’s not sure if he should talk about it with his parents because there are wizards  & elves in it & every time anything like that gets mentioned they get all funny. Remus guesses it’s probably because the myths about werewolves turned out to be true & they’re probably worried in case all the other stuff is true too.

 

Remus stays up all night reading the book, & thinks about how amazing it would be if some of it was true. It doesn’t seem fair that only the horrible myth should be true, because all that really means is that his parents worry about him & he hurts himself every month, & he has to spend ages in weird clinics being treated by strange doctors that don’t seem to be able to do anything.

 

He kind of wishes he was an elf because they don’t seem to care about the sorts of things that the people around him care about. His grandparents have mostly passed away within the last few years & his parents are sad about it & he hardly ever got to see them. The elves never have to move to a remote island or the highlands or Cornwall because they’re worried that a werewolf is coming to get them. Their families are large & they mostly get to see each other all of the time.

 

Remus wrinkles up his nose when he thinks about actually living in the _Lord of the Rings_ , though. He quite likes Aragorn & Frodo & Sam but he likes not doing much on Sundays & reading his books for school, & there’s not much of that happening here. Except in the Shire, of course. But even then...

 

The next day he’s so tired that he falls asleep in maths & the teacher lets him sleep at his desk until the cleaner wakes him up & it’s half six & he has NEVER been late home from school. His parents are going spare when he gets back, & they lock him in his room & Remus knows it’s only three days until the moon but it’s not really his fault & he doesn’t understand the point of locking him in with all of his things. He reads some more of the book, lying on his tummy in the middle of the room, & when he stretches out an hour or two after he’d settled down he feels achey & tired & he falls asleep again at the dinner table, right in the middle of eating his yorkshire pudding.

 

**March, 1971**

 

Remus comes home from school on his birthday with a couple of small presents stowed away in his rucksack. The boy who lent him the Lord of the Rings, Caleb, made him a small staff in woodwork club, & another boy, Frank, gave him a couple of old books by someone called Michael Moorcock. Remus thinks they’re brilliant but he’s worried about showing them to his parents, & he’s scared that he’ll be cornered before he can stow them away in his room safely.

 

When Remus steps into the hallway, he’s called into the kitchen, & has no choice. It’s just as he’d feared.

 

When he gets there, he stops still. Gandalf is sitting at the kitchen table. Or rather, somebody who looks a lot like Gandalf is sitting at the kitchen table. He’s not wearing white, though. & he doesn’t have a staff. Remus hovers in the doorway, uncertainly. Are his parents playing a joke on him? Do they know about his books?

 

Remus wants to cry.

 

“Remus,” his mother says, uncertainly. “This is Dumbledore. Albus. He’s here to talk to you about – about school, and some other things. Remus –”

 

She trails off, & Remus puts his thumb through a hole in his sleeve & then looks back at the man in the chair. “If you’re called Dumbledore, does that mean you’re not Gandalf?” Remus says out loud, disappointed despite himself.

 

Remus’s Dad is sat at the kitchen table with Dumbledore, & is staring at him as if he’s never seen anything quite so weird in all of his life. Which he definitely has, Remus thinks.

 

Dumbledore, to Remus’s surprise, laughs for a long time & then wipes his eyes & fixes Remus with a steady stare of his own. “I am not Gandalf,” he says, “although I’m sure you wish I was. Lots of children seem to, recently. I should find out who he is and invite him for tea. No, I’m afraid to say my name is Albus Dumbledore, and I’m the headmaster of a school that you might be interested in attending.”

 

Remus bristles. “Mum, I don’t want to go to the grammar down the road and anyway I’m too old to take the exam now aren’t I?”

 

“Albus is the headmaster of a school much further away,” his mother says, hesitating.

 

“Hogwarts is in Scotland,” Dumbledore says. “It’s not very close to Cornwall, but I’m sure you’d feel at home there if you gave it much of a chance.”  


“We lived in Scotland,” Remus says. “And Wales and the Shetlands and Norfolk and Shropshire and Crewe and Blackpool and we lived in a caravan somewhere I don’t know where it was when I was little.”

 

“Essex,” his Dad says, draining the last of a mug of coffee.

 

Remus wrinkles his nose & looks down at his feet & then up at Dumbledore again. “Anyway, I’m 12 today,” he says, “and that means it’s March, and so it’s quite the wrong time to start at a new school.”

 

Dumbledore smiles. “You would be starting in September, like all of the other pupils. I’m afraid you would be in a year group with children a year younger than yourself, but that can’t be helped. Remus, you’re a wizard, and Hogwarts is a school for wizards and witches. Your father went there. So did most of his family.”

 

Remus looks over at his Dad, scandalised. How could his Dad, who spends most evenings labouring over the washing up, who won’t let Remus watch most of the cartoons on television, who never has enough money for anything, possibly be a wizard?

 

Wait. Remus thinks again. How can he be a wizard? How can he himself, Remus, him, me, how could he be a wizard? He’s a werewolf. But wizards don’t exist. Not really.

 

Except, apparently they do. Remus struggles with this thought.

 

“I’m afraid he was expelled when he was fifteen,” Dumbledore says, & Remus doesn’t understand that either. “But Remus, I do believe that it is the right school for you. I became headmaster only a month ago, and one of the first things I did was make sure that we would be able to offer you a place. I’m afraid our previous headmaster wouldn’t allow it because of reasons that are entirely out of your control – but I don’t think that’s very fair. Do you?”

 

Remus dimly feels angry, & says, “no,” sort of angrily. But mostly he’s thinking – Dumbledore is talking about him being a werewolf. Doesn’t he care?

 

“I am of course,” Dumbledore says, his eyes steely, even as they twinkle, “talking about your being a werewolf. Remus, much as it upsets me to have to ask somebody so young to keep such a secret, about something that you are not in the least responsible for – you will have to keep this a secret for as long as you are at Hogwarts. We will of course arrange for a safe place for you to transform, and you will be looked after in the hospital wing after your transformations.”

 

“The other children will notice,” Remus’s Dad says, in a sullen voice. “They’ll notice that he’s gone every month.”

 

“Not if Remus tells them a convincing lie,” Dumbledore says. He looks down at Remus. “Normally I don’t encourage lying, especially to your friends – but here it will be necessary.”

 

Remus nods, & then wonders. Has he agreed to go? He thinks about Caleb & Frank & he then thinks about his strange ragbag mix of lessons, & he thinks about Caleb & Frank’s faces if he told them he’d said no to Gandalf asking him to start what, for all accounts, sounds at least like a minor adventure.

 

“Can I tell Caleb and Frank?” he asks, hopefully. But of course he can’t. 

 

Remus drifts in & out as his parents talk to Albus about the arrangements. There was never any real doubt that he’d go. 

 

Remus has never been very good at lying, but he’s never been very good at making friends. Caleb & Frank don’t even know him very well yet, & now they won’t.

 

Not for the first time, Remus thinks about how much he hates being a werewolf, & briefly  feels a spike of hate for himself too, as part of it.

 

As Dumbledore finishes a cup of tea & gets to his feet, Remus says goodbye, & doesn’t ask any of the questions he wants answered because he’s not sure how to word them & he doesn’t want to seem stupid & he doesn’t want to embarrass his Dad. But he goes to bed that night tired & confused & he dreams about wizards & staffs & his Dad, expelled at 15. Remus still can’t believe it, even when he’s asleep, but he’s trying to work it out. Somehow.


End file.
